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few hours later. It seemed like a long away from the refined world of the concert hall, and very demanding
too. I wondered how Hutchings coped. As it turns out, he wonders how people cope without classical
training.

“Playing music is a very physical thing, and at the Guildhall we learnt how to make beautiful sounds with a
big amount of air, how to use our whole bodies, how to control the energy we put in,” he says. “It’s helped
me hugely when I’m out touring.”

Still, most bands play the same handful of chords, over and over again, and Hutchings is doing intensely
complicated music. How does he jump from classical, to improvisational jazz, to cosmic rave? “The same
way a classical musician will move into different mindsets as he or she goes from Stravinsky, to Arvo Pärt,
to Brahms,” he says. “Every style has its own rules. Once you understand those rules, it gets a lot easier to
be in service to the music.”

All of this suggests that being a proper music nerd, the kind of person who practises for two hours each
evening before settling in with a cup of cocoa, is nothing be ashamed of. The singer and rapper Lizzo, the
breakout star of last year, is a classically trained flautist. Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist, has a
residency with the BBC Concert Orchestra and Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of the New York indie band
Vampire Weekend, has a degree in music from Columbia University.

The days of pretending to have never had a lesson in your life because that’s not cool are over. For the first
time since the early 1970s, alternative music is opening up to classical virtuosity, and a Noughties boom in
music education has a lot to do with that. Prince would surely approve.